Ethereum itself must pass the walkaway test. Ethereum is meant to be a home for trustless and trust-minimized applications, whether in finance, governance or elsewhere. It must support applications that are more like tools - the hammer that once you buy it's yours - than like services that lose all functionality once the vendor loses interest in maintaining them (or worse, gets hacked or becomes value-extractive). Even when applications do have functionality that depends on a vendor, Ethereum can help reduce those dependencies as much as possible, and protect the user as much as possible in those cases where the dependencies fail. But building such applications is not possible on a base layer which itself depends on ongoing updates from a vendor in order to continue being usable - even if that "vendor" is the all core devs process. Ethereum the blockchain must have the traits that we strive for in Ethereum's applications. Hence, Ethereum itself must pass the walkaway test. This means that Ethereum must get to a place where we _can ossify if we want to_. We do not have to stop making changes to the protocol, but we must get to a place where Ethereum's value proposition does not strictly depend on any features that are not in the protocol already. This includes the following: * Full quantum-resistance. We should resist the trap of saying "let's delay quantum-resistance until the last possible moment in the name of ekeing out more efficiencies for a while longer". Individual users have that right, but the protocol should not. Being able to say "Ethereum's protocol, as it stands today, is cryptographically safe for a hundred years" is something we should strive to get to as soon as possible, and insist on as a point of pride. * An architecture that can expand to sufficient scalability. The protocol needs to have the properties that allow it to expand to many thousands of TPS over time, most notably ZK-EVM validation and data sampling through PeerDAS. Ideally, we get to a point where further scaling is done through "parameter only" changes - and ideally _those_ changes are not BPO-style forks, but rather are made with the same validator voting mechanism we use for the gas limit. * A state architecture that can last decades. This means deciding, and implementing, whatever form of partial statelessness and state expiry will let us feel comfortable letting Ethereum run with thousands of TPS for decades, without breaking sync or hard disk or I/O requirements. It also means future-proofing the tree and storage types to work well with this long-term environment. * An account model that is general-purpose (this is "full account abstraction": move away from enshrined ECDSA for signature validation) * A gas schedule that we are confident is free of DoS vulnerabilities, both for execution and for ZK-proving * A PoS economic model that, with all we have learned over the past half decade of proof of stake in Ethereum and full decade beyond, we are confident can last and remain decentralized for decades, and supports the usefulness of ETH as trustless collateral (eg. in governance-minimized ETH-backed stablecoins) * A block building model that we are confident will resist centralization pressure and guarantee censorship resistance even in unknown future environments Ideally, we do the hard work over the next few years, to get to a point where in the future almost all future innovation can happen through client optimization, and get reflected in the protocol through parameter changes. Every year, we should tick off at least one of these boxes, and ideally multiple. Do the right thing once, based on knowledge of what is truly the right thing (and not compromise halfway fixes), and maximize Ethereum's technological and social robustness for the long term. Ethereum goes hard. This is the gwei.

“Ethereum was not created to make finance efficient or apps convenient. It was created to set people free” This was an important - and controversial - line from the Trustless Manifesto ( trustlessness.eth.limo ), and it is worth revisiting it and better understanding what it means. “efficient” and “convenient” have the connotation of improving the average case, in situations where it’s already pretty good. Efficiency is about telling the world's best engineers to put their souls into reducing latency from 473 ms to 368ms, or increasing yields from 4.5% APY to 5.3% APY. Convenience is about people making one click instead of three, and reducing signup times from 1 min to 20 sec. These things can be good to do. But we must do them under the understanding that we will never be as good at this game as the Silicon Valley corporate players. And so the primary underlying game that Ethereum plays must be a different game. What is the game? Resilience. Resilience is the game where it’s not about 4.5% APY vs 5.3% APY - rather, it’s about minimizing the chance that you get -100% APY. Resilience is the game where if you become politically unpopular and get deplatformed, or if a the developers of your application go bankrupt or disappear, or if Cloudflare goes down, or if an internet cyberwar breaks out, your 2000ms latency continues to be 2000ms. Resilience is the game where anyone, anywhere in the world will be able to access the network and be a first-class participant. Resilience is sovereignty. Not sovereignty in the sense of lobbying to become a UN member state and shaking hands at Davos in two weeks, but sovereignty in the sense that people talk about "digital sovereignty" or "food sovereignty" - aggressively reducing your vulnerabilities to external dependencies that can be taken away from you on a whim. This is the sense in which the world computer can be sovereign, and in doing so make its users also sovereign. This baseline is what enables interdependence as equals, and not as vassals of corporate overlords thousands of kilometers away. This is the game that Ethereum is suited to win, and it delivers a type of value that, in our increasingly unstable world, a lot of people are going to need. The fundamental DNA of web2 consumer tech is not suited to resilience. The fundamental DNA of _finance_ often spends considerable effort on resilience, but it is a very partial form of resilience, good at solving for some types of risks but not others. Blockspace is abundant. Decentralized, permissionless and resilient blockspace is not. Ethereum must first and foremost be decentralized, permissionless and resilient block space - and then make that abundant.

Welcome to 2026! Milady is back. Ethereum did a lot in 2025: gas limits increased, blob count increased, node software quality improved, zkEVMs blasted through their performance milestones, and with zkEVMs and PeerDAS ethereum made its largest step toward being a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of blockchain (more on this later) But we have a challenge: Ethereum needs to do more to meet its own stated goals. Not the quest of "winning the next meta" regardless of whether it's tokenized dollars or political memecoins, not arbitrarily convincing people to help us fill up blockspace to make ETH ultrasound again, but the mission: To build the world computer that serves as a central infrastructure piece of a more free and open internet. We're building decentralized applications. Applications that run without fraud, censorship or third-party interference. Applications that pass the walkaway test: they keep running even if the original developers disappear. Applications where if you're a user, you don't even notice if Cloudflare goes down - or even if all of Cloudflare gets hacked by North Korea. Applications whose stability transcends the rise and fall of companies, ideologies and political parties. And applications that protect your privacy. All this - for finance, and also for identity, governance and whatever other civilizational infrastructure people want to build. These properties sound radical, but we must remember that a generation ago any wallet, kitchen appliance, book or car would fulfill every single one of them. Today, all of the above are by default becoming subscription services, consigning you to permanent dependence on some centralized overlord. Ethereum is the rebellion against this. To achieve this, it needs to be (i) usable, and usable at scale, and (ii) actually decentralized. This needs to happen at both (a) the blockchain layer, including the software we use to run and talk to the blockchain, and (b) the application layer. All of these pieces must be improved - they are already being improved, but they must be improved more. Fortunately, we have powerful tools on our side - but we need to apply them, and we will. Wishing everyone an exciting 2026. Milady.

This is what I worry Europe will get negatively polarized into: an ideology taking pride in a neat, sanitized online environment free of evil corporate and fascist pathogens. I hope European govs do not go this way, and instead take a Pirate Party approach of user empowerment. First, what's wrong with the tweet I'm quoting: The idea that there should be "no space" for something you dislike is fundamentally a totalitarian and anti-pluralistic impulse. It's incompatible with being in an environment that you do not fully control. This is especially true for categories that are subjective and controversial, because you end up trying to fully remove things you think are pathogens, when other people have good faith disagreements, and because you give yourself the maximalist goal of not even giving them breathing room, you create conflict and end up building the machinery of technocratic authoritarianism to impose your victory in the conflict. So sorry, if you want to be a free society, you have to bite the bullet that some people, somewhere, will be selling things that you consider dangerous and saying things you consider disinformation and vicious lies. What is the goal to shoot for? You want to create an environment where those things don't dominate. This is the problem with twitter today: not that it's a safe space where 1000 people talk to each other in a corner about how heritage americans are the master race and putin is good or whatever, but that that crap gets shoved in our face on a mass scale, and the algorithms actively favor it. The right metaphor is not castles and walls, but biological - think, why European forests don't have tropical lizards. Having incentives for social media platforms to have less of those things instead of more is fundamentally reasonable, @audreyt has talked about how Taiwan has done something similar. You also want to do this in a way where it's clear what the underlying principle is, so it's not a vehicle for imposing arbitrary and frequently changing expert-consensus agendas. You also want to empower users, rather than working against them. People want to see and buy good things instead of bad things. Often the problem is that competition is too difficult in the current market. I actually supported the USB-C standardization mandate; it created more interoperability and thus improved competition and convenience. I would support incentivizing social platforms to be more open, and to be more transparent (eg. my proposal to require algorithms to be continuously published with a 1-2 year delay, with zk-proofs to ensure that the algorithm being used in real time exactly equals the one that gets published later) Being able to better identify what messages are coming from what communities is also good, though I don't support the direction of banning anonymity of individual posters, rather I would want to see more macro-scale analytics, eg. seeing what communities are most strongly saying and amplifying content that semantically matches a particular idea; this can be done in privacy-preserving ways. There is a real opportunity to reaffirm freedom of speech in a unique and different way, that emphasizes pluralism and pushes against unbalanced attempts to manipulate the discourse by individual powerful actors. We want to do this, not go down the dark path of having something that claims to support fundamental rights but actually is not trusted by anyone to be anything other than the fundamental right to follow the footsteps of a few technocratic experts.